Category: Gökhan Toka

Trump is the president, Erdogan will be this Sunday, the whole world is at the edge of an idiocratic collapse with both fascism and terrorism being on the rise, and lets face it: In these fragile days, Australia does not want you to visit her, even on a tourist visa. She wants you to stay away, until the tough days are over.

Well, at least this is my conclusion from watching Wolf Creek TV Series…

Through my childhood, Australia has always been a fascinating dream destination for me. Remote, lonely, wide and wild… Whatever you would name it, a perfect settling for a child’s dream.

Nothing has changed my dream about visiting the country so far, even the giant spiders, documentaries about them, poisonous jelly fish and the documentaries about them, oh well of course the sharks, how could i forget those, and of course the movies about giant white sharks off the Australian giant barrier, “The Reef”… Even the slashers and the red neck horror stories taking place in the remote Australian wildirness, they couldnt change my mind… The Dying Breed, The Wolf Creek; to me, these movies were nothing more than a sweet nostalgia around the dark past of the country when it was utilized by British as an isolated colony where they used to store all the criminals of their home land…

However the 2016 Wolf Creek Mini TV Series, which is based on the success of the Wolf Creek movie series, is pushing the limits a bit too high, and I’m about to change my mind…

In this TV series, everything looks the same with the movie series, the settlement, the main storyline, even the villain is the same: John Jarratt in the role of psychopat villain Mick Taylor, with exactly the same sickening laughs and convincing performance. So how is it different?

The answer is with the number of villains. Its not only Mick Taylor, almost everyone else with an Australian passport is a villain in the series, and they are all trying to kill our main protagonist. If you take this TV Series as a demographical base for your sociology thesis, you can easily conclude that the % of villains and psychopats to whole Australian population is around 90%, with only 10% standing on the bright side. And as a result, the tourists in the TV series, they are dying like flies: “Excuse me, how can i go to…?” BAAAAAAM! You are dead.

Touring the Australian wild, our main protagonist, a 19 year old college student “Eve” and her family are attacked by Mick Taylor. Eve’s whole family is brutally murdered by Mick, and Eve is also seriously wounded. However she somehow manages to survive, and upon recovering, she starts to search for Mick Taylor all around Australian wild, to pay him a revenge. Simple as that.

The story line is a bit simple and lacking the depth regarding to credibility and seriously underdeveloping some main side characters, and is not the strongest point regarding to the series. In addition to John Jarratt’s super performance as the psychopat Mick Taylor, what’s best about it, is probably the way it is crafted and edited, in terms of cinematography and colors, nicely catching the soul of Australian remoteness and the feeling of loneliness.

Well, except for the opening episode, which is a bit weak in terms of direction and edit quality. The most important starting events that will fire this 6 episode revenge rampage, are edited in a very fast pace, forming a little or no emotional foundation for the rest of the story. The issue is that, in similar stories where a movie series is adapted for TV, generally the creator of the movies directs the opening episodes, such as Sam Raimi directing the first episode of “Ash vs Evil Dead”, or David Fincher taking the role of director for the first two episodes of “House of Cards”. In 2016 Wolf Creek TV series to our surprise, the creator and director of the Wolf Creek movies, Greg McLean steps in to direct the closing episode to the series. Which… is not really a surprise by the way, as the closing episode throws in some fresh pieces of story in which we discover the childhood of Mick Taylor and the underlying story behind the birth of a psychopat, for the first time in the Wolf Creek legacy.